Kansas Officials Admit “Strong Correlation” Between Quakes & Fracking

Editor’s Note: There are a lot of global economic fun-and-games going on with the price of oil, due in part to the major increase in fracking, the American economic, apparently propped up in a false bubble largely because of the fracking, and the economic warfare against other nations, especially Russia. By there is far too little focus on the fun-and-games being perpetrated against the ordinary people of the United States who are put under environmental threat by fracking – it is contaminating groundwater, and injecting harmful chemical toxins into the drinking water supply.

The quakes are important, too, but basically just a canary in the coal mine warning us that something is very wrong with this practice. Ordinary taxpayers get to fund all the fun-and-games in Washington and global foreign policy, and we get to pay for our own demise, too. Where earthquakes are tied to fracking, it is reasonable to assume, there is a considerable likelihood of water contamination going on, too, though one need not follow the other.

Just keep in mind that everywhere fracking takes place over an aquifer zone, the public water supply – obviously vital to all life and agriculture in the region – is being put at risk. Perhaps it is true that most of the operations are done safely, but it seems clear that things are going wrong often enough; reports indicate that there is a problem here. Do you not see it?

There is a hierarchy of needs at play in evaluating every issue, and I dare say that water tops the list as a leading priority, even ahead of economic prosperity.
A map of the U.S. aquifers:

“If the government and the Kansas Corporation Commission care about the people of Kansas and the damages, they will order a moratorium,” exclaims Joe Spease, chairman of the Kansas Sierra Club’s fracking committee following a report from Kansas officials, who have been reluctant to link the mysterious earthquakes in south central Kansas to fracking, admitted last week that “we can say there is a strong correlation between the disposal of saltwater and the earthquakes.”

As LJWorld reports,it’s the first time state officials have so clearly stated the likely cause of the earthquakes, which are afflicting a region where fracking is widely used, as Rick Miller, a geophysicist and senior scientist for the Kansas Geological Survey, said he believes the injection of fracking chemicals into the earth has been a catalyst for the quakes.

During hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” for short, operators use a mixture of saltwater and chemicals to break tight underground rock formations to release oil and gas. To get rid of the water after the fracking process, operators inject the water deep into disposal wells.

Naming the cause of the earthquakes is, in part, a matter of semantics. Questions have long been raised about whether fracking activity is causing the earthquakes, and officials in other states have concluded that it has. But Kansas officials consider the waste water disposal a separate process, and so have not considered the fracking itself to be the key factor in the quakes.

At issue now is what, if any, action to take. The state’s Sierra Club chapter wants Kansas to follow in the steps of New York, New Hampshire, Maryland and numerous local governments nationwide and call a moratorium on fracking. Others, including Lawrence Rep. Tom Sloan, ask where the nation will get energy if the option is off limits.

…

“He is not being sincere,” said Joe Spease, chairman of the Kansas Sierra Club’s fracking committee and owner of a renewable energy company in Overland Park.

“It is so ridiculous, this issue of semantics,” Spease said. “There are millions of dollars in property damages happening, and we have our scientists playing word games.”

The Kansas Sierra Club supports a bill, not yet introduced, to impose a moratorium on fracking to give the oil and gas industry time to develop a solution to the saltwater disposal issue, Spease said.

“If the government and the Kansas Corporation Commission care about the people of Kansas and the damages, they will order a moratorium,” Spease said. “If they only care about the profits of the oil and gas (industry), it will be business as usual. I hope that is not the case.”

According to a team of scientists working under Duke University geochemistry professor Avner Vengosh, wastewater associated with fracking sites contains large amounts of ammonium and iodide, which may in turn encourage the formation of certain carcinogenic byproducts.

“We were not aware that they existed in oil and gas waste products,” Vengosh told ThinkProgress. “Until now, no one was aware — no one was monitoring for those contaminants.”

“The relatively high frequency of spills associated with the intensity of shale gas development and reports of an overall increase of the salinity in watersheds associated with hydraulic fracturing activities, combined with data presented in this study, suggest that the release of [oil and gas wastewater] to the environment is one of the major risks associated with the development of hydraulic fracturing,” the study reads. “Our findings indicate that discharge and accidental spills of [oil and gas wastewater] to waterways pose risks to both human health and the environment.”

As RT reported previously, a separate study published earlier this month determined that fracking in an Ohio community caused 77 earthquakes during a span of just a few days last March.

Ironically, two days after the paper published its report, four small quakes occurred in the southern part of the state and through neighboring Oklahoma.

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